Roofs of city houses were covered with green plants, and turned into gardens, enabling employés to do their business better because work was punctuated with restful visits to the flowers....
Soap was vigorously used. Cleanliness became a creed and a passion. Morning faces, floors and doorsteps shone. (Five fortunes would not induce me to divulge the name of the favourite soap.)
All British birds in cages were taken into the country and released. Gourmets started a league to prohibit the eating of larks. The woodlands, therefore, rang with happier songs, and Fairyland advanced with seven-league boots....
Bean-feasters devoted evenings to the practising of glees, reviving folk-songs, so that country roads were no longer rendered wretched with the crude strains of music-hall choruses. Delightful concerts were organized for Londoners among the green fields. England once more began to be merry with song....
Vulgarity lost its flavour. Rudeness was cold-shouldered. Jokes which were not nice were not laughed at. They fell flat as recumbent tomb-stones. Humour--the real article--lived again. It was pleasant to hear the persiflage of office-boys, which began to be original. Omnibus drivers and cabmen were sometimes really funny. As for judges, they always joked in the right places....
The elves and the Bodyguard looked to the hoardings, which became more pleasant and effective as the artistic charm of advertisements increased. Colours were chosen which combined harmoniously. Passers-by no longer suffered toothache and heart-spasm because of some militant eyesore. Those pestilent bobbly lights, that reiterate a trade-name at night-time, were torn down by righteous raging mobs, hammered and drowned....
What else the fairies did I need not detail here, for the reader who has come to this page has proved perfectly capable of adding to the series of their good effects. It was all just splendid.
London surely and rapidly recovered itself; and as its appearance and manners progressed towards perfection, more fairies, encouraged by the brightness, came; more pillar-boxes were settled upon; the circle of influence was still wider spread; the march of amelioration went on.
When a hundred fairies had arrived, and forty-three gnomes had followed them--which was not until October, the sere of the year, had arrived--June decided to give a garden-party on the roofs of Paradise Court.
Bim was appointed major-domo, lord high-butler, and general factotum, something like fifteen officials in one. He swelled visibly with proper pride. His energy in making the preparations was so intense--he managed so successfully to be in two places at once--that not a few of his fellow-gnomes thought him blessed with invisible wings. His dignity and importance were unquestionable. He wore the superiority, won through being the first gnome to brave the rigours of London, so openly that his brethren of the democracy became more than a wee bit envious. Perhaps Bim's head had become very slightly swelled.